The face of Londy Rodriguez Gomez continues to help bring in thousands of child sponsorships for Children International, a Kansas City-based organization.

But the photograph and accompanying fundraising appeal, which describes a 6-year-old child who weighs 44 pounds, stands 3-foot-10 and lives in a one-room shack with a tin roof, symbolize the myths of child sponsorship.

In reality, Londy Gomez is a teenager who likes fast food and rock 'n' roll music. She lives in a neatly kept masonry house with several rooms. Her father holds a full-time job and her mother runs a food stand out of their home, which has a television, a stereo, a microwave and a threadbare but matching sofa and chair. Though still quite poor, the family continues to strive for economic betterment.

Half a lifetime lies between the demure young lady Londy has become and the snapshot of the needy girl Children International took eight years ago and continued to use as recently as late last year. But in the child sponsorship industry, where powerful advertising images can supersede the facts of life, gaps between rhetoric and reality are common.

Operating from a spacious headquarters on the rolling prairie just outside Kansas City, Mo., Children International has crafted a sophisticated marketing program to establish an entrenched position in the child sponsorship industry.

CI promises its donors that it can do what other sponsorship agencies do, but for only $12 a month, about half the price of the competition. Instead of emphasizing large-scale community development, the organization says it can work a miracle in a needy child's life by delivering a buffet of goods and services.

At the heart of that appeal, which has taken Children International from an obscure religious charity to a $65 million-a-year marketing machine in the space of two decades, is the face of a tiny child.

"When you look at a child's eyes," says Jerry Huntsinger, a direct-mail fundraiser and former architect of Children International's appeals, "you are seeing your inner self. Everything was built around their eyes. Girls work better than boys. Young children work better than older ones. Never have a teenager."

A Children International photographer first took Londy's picture in 1989, according to her mother, Rosa Gomez, after Londy had been a sponsored child for about two years. The charity has used the picture since.

Gomez said she had no idea her daughter's picture was being used to attract prospective sponsors, although she offered no strong objection. When Londy saw her kindergarten-era image, she suppressed an embarrassed giggle.

Officials for Children International declined to answer questions about the representations the organization has made about Londy. In fact, with limited exceptions, the organization's top officials largely declined to answer questions posed by the Chicago Tribune about its operations or the way it uses the millions of dollars it raises from the public each year.

But a review of internal documents and financial filings and interviews with more than a dozen former employees offers a fuller portrait of the charity.

Nearly 30 years ago, Children International was a down-on-its-luck charity led by Rev. Ralph Baney, a flamboyant fundraiser who spent sponsor dollars on Tennessee walking horses, an 85-foot luxury yacht and an opulent "worldwide headquarters" with a ceiling-to-floor indoor waterfall.

Today, Children International is one of the nation's fastest-growing child sponsorship organizations, operating on four continents. It positions itself as the low-cost provider of child sponsorship, using evocative ads and pictures of children to attract donors with two of the most time-honored pitches in advertising: low price and a no-money-down offer.

The trappings of its success are evident in Children International's headquarters, a French Colonial-style building with sweeping grounds that look more like a country club than a charity. Its most recent balance sheet shows an endowment fund of $16 million, money the charity has invested in a variety of stocks, bonds and government securities.

But the hallmark of Children International's success is its marketing--a combination of fundraising techniques and television ads that dramatically portray how charities sell the idea of child sponsorship to millions of Americans.

Although much of Children International's success occurred in recent years, the story of its transformation began in 1970 when the organization hired an accountant named Joseph Gripkey.